Columns

Restoring hope and opportunity is critical to lifting up our communities who feel like they have been left behind.
We have people all across the country living paycheck to paycheck who are forced to make choices no family should, like whether they should pay for heat in the winter or purchase necessary medications. Our country has witnessed under-employment rates soar, high school graduation rates drop, and poverty numbers remain stagnant.

Billy Dale McCants, my son, was in a car wreck Nov. 12, 1988. I met the then-16th Circuit Solicitor Tommy Pope in 1995 for the trial of the two men that murdered my other son, Deputy James Brent McCants, killed in the line of duty Sept. 25, 1992.
Tommy and his wife, Kim, are the best people I know. They really care for people. You become their friends, and they are yours.
Tommy became speaker pro tem of the S.C. House in 2014. Now he is running for the 5th District congressional seat.

Last week the S.C. House of Representatives adopted, with no objections, a resolution congratulating Gov. Henry McMaster on his ascension to the office – and encouraging him to expand Medicaid in South Carolina. This was unexpected, because the House, at least on paper, has been against expanding Medicaid.
Clearly, no one other than the House member who introduced it and perhaps a few of the cosponsors had even glanced at the resolution.

While Election Day is behind us, there is still a lot going on in local and state politics.
The upcoming meeting of the Lancaster County Republican Party puts you in the middle of it, giving you a chance to meet the candidates, live and in person. The February meeting will be Thursday, Feb. 23, at 7 p.m. at Mike Williams Builders, located at 1351 Charlotte Highway, Lancaster. Here are some great reasons to attend our upcoming meeting.

We were saddened to hear about the passing of state Rep. Joe Neal of Hopkins.
First elected to the S.C. House in 1992, Rep. Neal represented District 70 in Richland and Sumter counties. He also served as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Chester.

An important deadline is approaching for Lancaster County taxpayers – the closing of the county’s 2016 tax books, which takes place on March 16.
This is a key step in the annual budgeting process for our county government, as it allows those who serve on county council, the school board and the town and city councils to determine how much tax revenue they will have to work with as they finish their 2017-18 budgets.

Today I bring you some thoughts from Jon Butzon, who has spent years working to improve and reform education in South Carolina. He believes that not only should we have great schools but we can have great schools for every child in South Carolina. Here is what he thinks we should do.
There is no waltzing around it. K-12 public education in South Carolina is not working.

Two weeks ago, the S.C. Senate passed a bill that would lay the groundwork for the governor to appoint the state superintendent of education — making the Department of Education a cabinet agency and fully accountable to the governor. The bill has yet to pass the House, but a similar bill passed the House last session.

Last winter, the Committee to Incorporate Van Wyck, which I chaired, began advocating for the incorporation of Van Wyck as a defense against the involuntary annexation of Van Wyck by the proposed Town of Indian Land.

In 1929, Gaffney native W.J. Cash wrote his seminal book “The Mind of the South.”
Every subsequent attempt to understand the mind (and soul) of the South necessarily starts with this book. It has been so since it was written and will probably continue to be so for generations to come. It is that good.
The premise of Cash’s book is that there is a distinctive Southern mind, and I believe there is also a “sub-species” native to the Palmetto State that we could call the South Carolina mind.